When Jack Sully used his Avatar to live real experiences on Pandora while his sleeping body was lying in a capsule, not many knew that 10 years down the line a similar technology would be available to everyone.
For those who still don’t know what it is, virtual reality (VR) is a technology that allows the simulation of realistic situations in real time and the interaction with the objects and people part of it.
Even if today it is often presented at trade fairs and conventions, especially those dedicated to video games, opportunities for application are endless.
VR was introduced at Acea thanks to the collaboration with Start Smart, a young Italian start-up. “The very first collaboration with Acea involved the development of a game to present the company and its business during Recruiting Days” says Cristiano Maci, co-founder and CTO of Start Smart.
Recruiting Days are days dedicated to the selection of junior figures during which candidates are involved in group activities to assess their interpersonal and management skills, individual interviews and immersive experiences to come in contact with the company in the fastest and most engaging ways possible.
Acea is one of the first companies in Italy to use a virtual-reality app integrated with technical and operational training. In some cases, we only train our people only on a theoretical level, as it is not possible to reproduce specific situations, especially the most complex ones, in a realistic way. With VR it is possible to train people in a reiterative and repeated way to teach them how to handle each situation by setting up a workstation inside a room.
This technology helps to organize courses, facilitates learning and makes training programs fast, engaging and effective.
This is how the VR application to train operators in confined spaces was born.
We proposed the project to our colleagues at Acea Ato 2 and they immediately showed interest and working closely with the Start Smart team we analyzed carefully the training content and methods currently in use and worked out ways of reproducing them in virtual reality.
The first step was writing the script: like with films or video games, we wrote a story that included all the standard operations and procedures that an operator must follow in confined spaces.
“We also added complex situations, designed to test the operator’s skills” continues Cristiano.
The next stage was about graphics and visually recreating places down to the smallest details. The last stage was the coding to create the software at the basis of the application.
